Don't Store Things You Care About In /tmp

“Hey guys,” he says, stepping into our office. “I have a problem.”

“What is it?” we reply.

“Now that I’m back from vacation I find all the data for a project I was doing is missing.”

“Restore it from backup.”

“It doesn’t seem to have been backed up, either.”

“Where was the data?”

“/tmp.”

“Ever heard of tmpwatch?” It’s now obvious why it’s missing and why it didn’t get backed up.

“No…”

Moral of the story: /tmp is for temporary stuff, not your big project’s data.

1 thought on “Don't Store Things You Care About In /tmp”

  1. I’m not sure this was a developer or not, but I’m guessing “yes” based on the last post.

    I have *zero* pull in our Computer Science department, but I’ve always wanted to teach one freaking lecture in every project course I could about “system administration for developers” or “don’t be a moron and *actually* understand the system you are on and the recurring processes on said system”

    One can dream, can’t he?

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